They've diversified. Their primary market is now in providing entertainment to Linux geeks. To help keep those hosting costs affordable, groklaw keeps serving out the content for 'em.
If this whole thing was a Microsoft move, it doesn't seem to have gained them much, other than another crushed-competitor notch in Tux's belt. Or on his beak, or whatever.
Microsoft doesn't deserve this criticism
on
Korean MSN Site Hacked
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· Score: 4, Insightful
"CNN is reporting that MSN's Korean website was hacked in order to allow usernames and passwords to be stolen. Microsoft is initially blaming unpatched, outsourced servers. Just another embarrassment to Microsoft's security push."
Yes, Microsoft has a good deal of well-deserved bad karma. That you could consider this to be a failing of their software is ridiculous, though. If this is an embarassment to Microsoft, many Free, Open software packages of every sort, from Apache to Linux to OpenBSD to OpenSSH have been so embarassed.
I'm all for calling out Microsoft when they're (a) full of marketing bullshit, (b) way behind everyone else technically, and (c) playing dirty politics. They deserve to be criticized then. But this is simply a non-event. They had a website get cracked. Big deal. Heck, Sourceforge, the largest repository of Open Source software, has been cracked multiple times, if you want an Open Source counterpart.
Blame Microsoft when they deserve it, and your words will get more weight. If Oracle had run out and said that "Our database is hacker-proof", and the next day their website had been broken into and their database cracked, that would be a fair point to criticize someone. But simply "you had a website cracked" is no longer a big deal for most companies.
I've been on Slashdot for years and written thousands of posts (with another personna), and I have to say that this ranks right up there with the best posts ever. It's original, it's funny, it's literate, it isn't too short or too long, it ties together Slashdot culture waay, waaay back, and it doesn't even mangle the verse. If there's ever a story on Slashdot about "Best Slashdot Posts", this definitely goes in there.
Hell. Least I can do is give you a "Friend" rating.
There should be a sliding tax scale. Why should the guy who makes $10 an hour pay a whole hours worth of work to have his monitor disposed, when the guy making $80 an hour only has to pay 7 minutes of his time for the same government service??
Well, some of that is because the guy with $10 an hour spent four to ten years of his post-high-school years making money, during which time the guy with $80 an hour spent those same years *paying* money (about as much as the other guy was *making*) and then educating himself without any guarantee of a return on his investment.
'course, supply and demand is some of that too, but those four-to-ten years come in somewhere.
It's not a date rape drug substitute, at least in the obvious sense.
Ingestion doesn't work -- it's destroyed before hitting the brain.
Inhalation does work, but according to the researchers (who obviously have some bias), a very high concentration is required -- they implied that it would be a visible fog in the air to be causing significant impact.
Injection is apparently ideal. The new truth serum for a good cop/bad cop scenario?
Of course, given the vast range of applications of a substance that makes someone love and trust another, I'm sure that there are all kinds of chemical companies, governments, and individuals batting around all sorts of ideas.
but why can't there be legislation that FORCES pornographic websites to use such a suffix from now on?
Because the entire world uses DNS, and the entire world doesn't have a consistent standard for what is socially acceptable when it comes to sexuality.
Some Islamic countries consider it socially unacceptable to show anything other than the eyes and hands of a woman.
In the US, we'd consider the French and British tendancies to stick topless women on TV unacceptable.
Japan has a real problem with showing genital hair, but no problem at all with representing underage characters.
The problem is that it suddenly tries to stick a single moral standard on the entire world to make a few short-sighted people who are agitating for an "xxx" domain (because they're scared Junior *might* discover what a woman looks like before getting married, God forbid!)
This promises to create an almost unlimited number of social problems. Why, why, *why* is ICANN letting this through? Okay, if we want to have a.xxx.us domain, we can make it, but there is zero reason aside from registrars pushing for more short-term money and a few short-sighted people pushing to "solve" the "Internet porn problem".
It's possible to build a worldwide content-rating system, but tying it into DNS (at least using the current approach) is just plain stupid. You want websites to be rated, add a/rating.txt file that works like the robots.txt that indicates level of content, and have web browsers and proxies respect it. For Christ's sake. But don't do something goddamn stupid like add a.xxx TLD.
At that point, for everyone who could genuinely take advantage of true anonymity to make a contribution to society -- and I'm sure these people do exist -- how many spammers, virus writers, phishers, fraudsters, copyright violators, organised criminals, paedophiles, and even (really, for once) terrorists are we letting get away with it?
In a system allowing large scale (in the sense that there will be malicious users) anonymous access, there can be no vulnerabilities. It is as simple as that. If there are vulnerabilities, then you can't allow anonymous access.
Our email system has vulnerabilities. One user can cause vastly disproportionate damages (human time wasted on spam versus a cost in mere bandwidth and CPU cycles). Ability to amplify damages counts as a vulnerability, in terms of DoS attacks. This means that, yes, email cannot have anonymous users.
This is probably why Tor is not a viable long-term anonymous solution. It allows access to outside systems, many of which have vulnerabilities and are not designed to support anonymous users.
It is *quite* possible to have systems that do support anonymous users.
At that point, for everyone who could genuinely take advantage of true anonymity to make a contribution to society -- and I'm sure these people do exist -- how many spammers, virus writers, phishers, fraudsters, copyright violators, organised criminals, paedophiles, and even (really, for once) terrorists are we letting get away with it?
Ah, see, now you're showing bias -- you like the ability (not present in anonymous systems) of the majority to punish the minority for views that the majority does not agree with. Let's take a look:
spammers, virus writers, phishers, fraudsters
Yup, you can't allow anonymous access to a system that has vulnerabilities regarding anonymous use. If you have a user that could be scammed by a stranger coming up to him on the streets of New York, then you have a user that could be scammed by a random emailer. Email systems of today do not support anonymous users safely.
copyright violators...paedophiles
(I assume by paedophiles you mean those who spread and download child pornography, since that's really the only context in which this makes sense.) Yup. You can't have law enforcement on data propagation in an anonymous system. I wouldn't say that this is "good" or "bad" -- it's just a different system to work within. You can't limit content.
organised criminals...terrorists
Again, in an anonymous system, you don't have the ability to punish users for spreading data that the majority dislikes.
It might be worth considering that American Revolutionary War-era sniping, vandalism, and treason is all viewed as having been perfectly reasonable and just (at least in the US) today, but would have been on par with "the terrorists" to King George.
I am one of those people that believes that it is possible to have an anonymous data transfer system that is useful and can provide a valuable set of services. Some things may have to be done differently from how they are in a non-anonymous setting, but I don't think that it's an environment in which humans cannot function.
There is and never will be complete anonymity as long as two points are the beginning and end of a communication. There is only obfuscation and misdirection.
This is not true. Broadcasts provide receivers with anonymity.
I have AbiWord and Open Office on my computer at the moment, as well as gnumeric. I rarely use "business productivity applications", but they're still there. Just off the top of my head, I have twice as many spreadsheets and wordprocessors on my computer as the typical Windows user does.
if i am receiving packets, my system must know the address of that sender. that is TCP/IP. therefore, the sender can always be determined.
First, no, because the sender can spoof an IP. However, another system can also forward packets for another. As you said, C can forward backets between A and B.
if you have sender A, receiver B, and intermediary C that passes packets between A and B, C is for all intents and purposes the sender. C will get sued.
(And it doesn't have to be "sued" -- it could be "fired", "divorced", or "arrested", depending upon the content).
Nope. Usenet operators don't get sued, and plenty of content on Usenet is politically hot, illegal, unethical, and you name it. As long as the system simply takes the role of blindly handing on data, without regard for its legality or illegality, it's currently okay in the US.
Phone networks, forums, and so forth are generally immune as well. If they're *knowingly* spreading a particular tidbit of illegal content, *then* they're asking for trouble.
I mean, sure, portability is nice in a product, but the number of times I've moved my monitors is probably countable on my fingers. With cheap laptops being available, most people that really need to move around much at all just use a laptop.
No, I'm not dead wrong on color accuracy. Go to Tom's Harware and look at the test results of the latest LCDs they reviewed yourself.
(a) There are still people who read Tom's Hardware?
(b) Okay, I did. Now, where is the comparison to CRTs? I see two LCDs being compared against each other -- apparently they are similar. What should I be deriving from this about CRT's versus LCDs?
I have new twin 20" LCDs at work and a new 19" CRT at home (none of which are high-end products), and I can easily say that:
* The CRT can produce much more intense colors.
* The CRT can produce deeper blacks and brighter whites.
* The CRT has faster response time (even CRTs don't update instantly, but it's hard to see trails caused by a light object on a dark area on it, and not hard on the LCD).
Now, both monitors are much better than their predecessors from a few years ago. The CRT is as flat as the LCD, doesn't show any brightness variation over the surface, and has faster response time than my previous, six-year-old CRT. The LCD doesn't show color banding, has no dead pixels, and the trails are no longer bad enough to be distracting. But if I have to choose just one, I'd take the CRT, for the above reasons, and because:
* CRTs can do multiple resolutions without looking horrendous.
* CRTs cost less.
* CRTs have better refresh rates (not just response times).
* The main advantage of desktop LCDs from my standpoint is the space savings -- and at work, all that means is that there's a big, empty, unused gap behind my monitors instead of a gap containing the rear end of a monitor.
Oh, and CRT's DO fade. It's the nature of phospher technology. Contrast and brightness setting can effect the longevity of your CRT but it's design necessitates fading. There's a huge difference between a 5yr old monitor and a brand new one. Put them side by side and look for yourself. I have.
Sure, but all that means is that you turn up the brightness once a year to compensate for the very slow decrease in brightness. You aren't going to be running the thing at 100% brightness at the beginning, so you have many years of brightness decrease in the thing. I had my previous monitor for six years, and never had brightness or contrast above 75%, even at the end.
However, the vast majority of CRTs out there are crap that costs less than half that amount and you know it.
Let's be fair. You're complaining about him discussing a premium $450 CRT, while you were advocating the technical benefits of LCDs using a rather more expensive premium LCD to do so. How about the obvious counterargument -- that the majority of LCDs out there are not comparable to the LCD that you are using as an example?
LVM handles both adding physical volumes and removing physical volumes from a logical volume group. I'm not familiar enough with Windows' logical volume mechanism to say whether or not it can do so.
If you specifically want parity (i.e. RAID level 5), then LVM alone won't solve your problems, since it doesn't do parity generation.
This is a good point. The comparison is being made *based on cost*. If Linux servers are half as expensive in initial cost as Windows servers and there are twice as many Linux servers out there, the survey still holds.
Can all the drives be used efficiently, or is this wasteful in some way?
I believe all the RAID levels would take the size of the smallest drive and only use that ammount on all drives.
However, what you want is actually a single logical volume across multiple physical devices, and both Windows and Linux can do this. I forget the term for it under Windows, but under Linux, you want LVM or "Logical Volume Manager".
Okay, you asked for it. Here's a raw, unvarnished look into the secret world of the neoconservative. This site has many other threads that will help you understand Bush supporters. Or at least be amused.
"BS", not "FUD". "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt" is a particular subcateogry of "BS" that does not apply here. Nobody is trying to alarm someone with vague accusations.
Kinda scary imho, but at the same time, I'm not worried. Why? Because I haven't done anything wrong.
Read 1984, which discusses this exact concept -- the very straightforward idea, that "people who have done nothing wrong have nothing to fear, so it should be acceptable to monitor everything".
The problem with it is that this strategy leads an unstable system that can easily degrade into a very unpleasant system. If the government starts abusing the power against political opponents, and it's a felony to inform someone that they're being monitored. It allows the majority to enforce all of their values on the minority -- one reason our democracy works is because the ability of the majority to monitor and punish those who deviate from their views is limited for simple, technical reasons (right now, it's really impossible to monitor all transgressions). For example, most of the US is Christian. Would you want to be punished for views that do not fit with a Christian view? And if you were, history has told us (the Catholic church in the past, Soviet Russia, etc) that the ability to punish those with value deviations can be used to indoctrinate new members of the system with the same values, and thus perpetuate and spread ideology that is globally nonoptimal.
In your particular case, (no DHCP logs, minimum mail) this may represent minimal privacy intrusion.
But what about all the people that *do* keep logs? Or are required to by the *next* law that gets passed (which isn't "so bad", since it's become already legal for the feds to sieze any data generated).
The two terms are "paleoconservatives" and "neoconservatives". The current crop of Bush supporters are generally "neoconservatives" -- PNAC fans. The conservatives that agree with Bush on social values (limiting stem cell research, partial-birth-abortions, condom education, etc), but disagree with him when it comes to expanding spending and his transfer of state rights (especially security and police-related) to the federal government) are called paleoconservatives, and while they may support Bush, you will probably hear griping from them.
Paleoconservatives are financially similar to libertarians (though not socially similar). Neoconservatives are pretty much exactly opposed to libertarians.
First of all, I'd like to say that Slashdot's human-testing images are getting ever-more unreadable and are approaching the point that I can't read them. Guys, if we've reached the point that the OCR is that good, you just need to use a new approach to distinguish between robots and people.
Okay. On to story commentary.
My one, overriding point is that I think that this guy frequently asks for something to alleviate something that irritates him, but doesn't consider what would actually happen if he *got* that thing.
We get so overjoyed every time an enemy actually shoots from cover in a game that we forgive the fact that real, advanced A.I. is as much an unfulfilled promise as the flying car. Where are the FPS bad guys who can adapt their strategy on the fly?
(a) This is hard to do. Really, really hard. Every CS student who goes in and takes some basic AI classes immediately thinks "Gee, I can just ram all these variables into a neural net and have a learning AI". Then they get time last in the development process, and then discover that it isn't actually so easy to produce "intelligent" behavior. A second problem is that most AIs provide a reasonably consistent behavior. It may be kind of stupid to have a monster run straight at a character, but at least it's not the monster running in the opposite direction and shooting at his own comrades. That's easy to happen in a "learning" environment, because you have to deal with something that can change its logic significantly. AI has a lot of input variables involved, and it's hard to test every case available, and just one screw-up really breaks the illusion. With *humans*, this isn't a problem because every person has a huge set of knowledge that we call "common sense" that will override stupid behavior. We can't just produce an AI with common sense (well, maybe we can, but if so, it's going to have much more important impacts than making FPSes slightly more fun).
(b) Real AI isn't necessarily fun. It's exciting to mow down mobs of stupid enemies, because you're vicariously enjoying the equivalent of a superhero. Think about what happens in real life, with real, human-level AI. There are no 5000 person killing sprees that go on for days. Someone kills maybe twenty people, a SWAT team hunkers down, sits in a negotiation position, and maybe shoots the guy. That's not fun or exciting (well, unless you want a SWAT simulation).
(c) Screenshots sell games. AI increases replayability. Nobody (nobody statistically significant) plays a game for fifty hours and then decides whether or not to buy a game. Not surprisingly, the bulk of the cycles go to better screenshots.
(d) Remember that *you* had fun with enemies that come right at you years ago. Now, you know all the techniques to beat simple strategies like that, and you want something new. But lots of people didn't spend vast amounts of time learning these strategies, so straight-at-me still works nicely for them.
(e) If you want it, convince reviewers to review it. That means longer review times. That means players being willing to wait for later reviews (and not just going to the first review, which discusses graphics and cosmetics). Players seem to pretty consistently go to the early reviews. To really know a game well, I'd say that a (knowledgeable) gamer would have to play it start-to-end, possibly a few times, though this depends on the genre. No mainstream Web reviewers are going to do this, because it takes so bloody long.
It has to do with the fact that both the XBox 360 and the PS3's Cell CPU use "in-order" processing, which, to greatly simplify, means they've intentionally crippled the ability to make clever A.I. and dynamic, unpredictable, wide-open games in favor of beautiful water reflections and explosion debris that flies through the air prettily.
I haven't followed the XBox or PS3 design at all, but this smells an awful lot like random bullshit from someone without a technical background. V
One Bible teacher I heard tried to argue that in order for aliens to exist on other planets, Jesus would have had to go and die for their sins.
It's okay. Squeeple Gorb III, the green blob lifeform on their own planet, already died for their sins.
Seriously, Jesus would have been an Arabic-looking guy. But go to Europe or the US, and you get a very distinctive Anglo-Saxon brown beard and hair that looks kind of like a non-pudgy Stallman wearing a pure white robe. We've gotten so used to it that we don't notice it.
If you go to Mexico, you'll see pictures of a Mexican Jesus, and to China pictures of a Chinese Jesus. Very unsettling. It really drives home the scamminess of the whole thing.
I was asking questions on www.linuxquestions.org, but nobody could help me even though I posted all of the error messages and problems, so they recommend I try another version of Linux.
Often a blame-shifting problem. If nobody present is sure what to do, recommending "another distro" is a popular way to avoid staining Linux's reputation. (And this is coming from someone who doesn't own any Windows computers.) There are good reasons to choose particular distros, but if you are looking for a general-purpose distribution and someone is recommending switching distros to solve a particular problem, and you're already using one of the mainstream distros (Fedora, Debian, SuSE, Mandriva....), then they are not giving you good advice. It should be quite possible to get things working on your distro.
I'd recommend trying an appropriate Linux Usenet newsgroup for help, and if you know what software package is breaking, the mailing list or IRC channel for that software package. I've been unimpressed with a number of general Linux web forums -- there are so many web forums that the degree of expertise on them is spread very thin, and it seems to be a large number of new folks that are just getting things up and running.
You shouldn't need to recompile anything to get Fedora working again. The days of recompiles solving things are pretty much in the past -- this was mainly an issue back before everyone started using modular kernels, and folks had to recompile their kernels when they added hardware.
This site illustrates one of the problems with Linux that most regular users would have. How do you pick one of these? How do you compare them all and say "That one has the features I need". It looks like there is at least 50+ different distros. Do you have to click on each little site info graphic just to learn about them? It is just too confusing to know which one to use, and I'm a computer programmer with a decent amount of computer skills. I'd hate to see what poor Aunt Mable or Grandma would think if they saw that list.
The typical "default choice" that I'd probably recommend would be Fedora. It has wide deployment and thus is the distro most likely to be supported by any binary-only software, and most likely to be well-tested with a given application. It isn't as radically Free as Debian, but it's in the close second-tier -- RH does a number of things that aren't in their own interest but promotes the use of Free software, like including Mozilla instead of Netscape before it was really ready, or including ogg support instead of mp3 support. Fedora is probably not the best choice if you already know that prefer KDE to Gnome, since Red Hat puts more work into Gnome than KDE.
Debian is probably best for folks who want to work on a maximally community-oriented system, where as many people as possible are volunteer contributors.
For off-CD, no-hard-drive-installation running, Knoppix seems to have pretty much taken over -- I don't look at SuperRescue any more when I want to do rescue work.
Everyone has their own preferences, of course, and biases based on what they use. I can only give what reflects my own.:-)
* I don't like SuSE, because they seem to have moved a little too far away from the Free ideology, from an interview with their CEO that I read. I remember Ransom Love doing this, and what ensued. Also, I'm not thrilled with their actions (like delaying distribution of ISOs for new distro releases until after they've sold commercial copies for a while).
* I don't know what the story is with Mandrake (well, Mandriva these days). They kept chugging along for a long time. I've never used them, but they used to be my recommendation for people that wanted "Red Hat, but with a KDE focus".
* Periodically, I think about looking at Gentoo (I don't have much reason to go to the effort of switching distros, but it'd be interesting to try installing it sometime I'm just setting up a throwaway Linux box to wor
(a) This has nothing to do with RFID, as the parent stated.
(b) Mice powered by induction from a special mousepad (or top-of-the-mousepad) have been around for a very long time. Presumably these didn't catch on for the same reason that optical mice that required a mousepad with a grid didn't catch on -- people don't like being forced to have a particular mousepad.
(c) Tesla owns your ass, mouse-people -- he powered lamps with remotely transmitted power twenty-five miles away.
Slashdot Mirror
They've diversified. Their primary market is now in providing entertainment to Linux geeks. To help keep those hosting costs affordable, groklaw keeps serving out the content for 'em.
If this whole thing was a Microsoft move, it doesn't seem to have gained them much, other than another crushed-competitor notch in Tux's belt. Or on his beak, or whatever.
"CNN is reporting that MSN's Korean website was hacked in order to allow usernames and passwords to be stolen. Microsoft is initially blaming unpatched, outsourced servers. Just another embarrassment to Microsoft's security push."
Yes, Microsoft has a good deal of well-deserved bad karma. That you could consider this to be a failing of their software is ridiculous, though. If this is an embarassment to Microsoft, many Free, Open software packages of every sort, from Apache to Linux to OpenBSD to OpenSSH have been so embarassed.
I'm all for calling out Microsoft when they're (a) full of marketing bullshit, (b) way behind everyone else technically, and (c) playing dirty politics. They deserve to be criticized then. But this is simply a non-event. They had a website get cracked. Big deal. Heck, Sourceforge, the largest repository of Open Source software, has been cracked multiple times, if you want an Open Source counterpart.
Blame Microsoft when they deserve it, and your words will get more weight. If Oracle had run out and said that "Our database is hacker-proof", and the next day their website had been broken into and their database cracked, that would be a fair point to criticize someone. But simply "you had a website cracked" is no longer a big deal for most companies.
I've been on Slashdot for years and written thousands of posts (with another personna), and I have to say that this ranks right up there with the best posts ever. It's original, it's funny, it's literate, it isn't too short or too long, it ties together Slashdot culture waay, waaay back, and it doesn't even mangle the verse. If there's ever a story on Slashdot about "Best Slashdot Posts", this definitely goes in there.
Hell. Least I can do is give you a "Friend" rating.
There should be a sliding tax scale. Why should the guy who makes $10 an hour pay a whole hours worth of work to have his monitor disposed, when the guy making $80 an hour only has to pay 7 minutes of his time for the same government service??
Well, some of that is because the guy with $10 an hour spent four to ten years of his post-high-school years making money, during which time the guy with $80 an hour spent those same years *paying* money (about as much as the other guy was *making*) and then educating himself without any guarantee of a return on his investment.
'course, supply and demand is some of that too, but those four-to-ten years come in somewhere.
It's not a date rape drug substitute, at least in the obvious sense.
Ingestion doesn't work -- it's destroyed before hitting the brain.
Inhalation does work, but according to the researchers (who obviously have some bias), a very high concentration is required -- they implied that it would be a visible fog in the air to be causing significant impact.
Injection is apparently ideal. The new truth serum for a good cop/bad cop scenario?
Of course, given the vast range of applications of a substance that makes someone love and trust another, I'm sure that there are all kinds of chemical companies, governments, and individuals batting around all sorts of ideas.
but why can't there be legislation that FORCES pornographic websites to use such a suffix from now on?
.xxx.us domain, we can make it, but there is zero reason aside from registrars pushing for more short-term money and a few short-sighted people pushing to "solve" the "Internet porn problem".
/rating.txt file that works like the robots.txt that indicates level of content, and have web browsers and proxies respect it. For Christ's sake. But don't do something goddamn stupid like add a .xxx TLD.
Because the entire world uses DNS, and the entire world doesn't have a consistent standard for what is socially acceptable when it comes to sexuality.
Some Islamic countries consider it socially unacceptable to show anything other than the eyes and hands of a woman.
In the US, we'd consider the French and British tendancies to stick topless women on TV unacceptable.
Japan has a real problem with showing genital hair, but no problem at all with representing underage characters.
The problem is that it suddenly tries to stick a single moral standard on the entire world to make a few short-sighted people who are agitating for an "xxx" domain (because they're scared Junior *might* discover what a woman looks like before getting married, God forbid!)
This promises to create an almost unlimited number of social problems. Why, why, *why* is ICANN letting this through? Okay, if we want to have a
It's possible to build a worldwide content-rating system, but tying it into DNS (at least using the current approach) is just plain stupid. You want websites to be rated, add a
At that point, for everyone who could genuinely take advantage of true anonymity to make a contribution to society -- and I'm sure these people do exist -- how many spammers, virus writers, phishers, fraudsters, copyright violators, organised criminals, paedophiles, and even (really, for once) terrorists are we letting get away with it?
In a system allowing large scale (in the sense that there will be malicious users) anonymous access, there can be no vulnerabilities. It is as simple as that. If there are vulnerabilities, then you can't allow anonymous access.
Our email system has vulnerabilities. One user can cause vastly disproportionate damages (human time wasted on spam versus a cost in mere bandwidth and CPU cycles). Ability to amplify damages counts as a vulnerability, in terms of DoS attacks. This means that, yes, email cannot have anonymous users.
This is probably why Tor is not a viable long-term anonymous solution. It allows access to outside systems, many of which have vulnerabilities and are not designed to support anonymous users.
It is *quite* possible to have systems that do support anonymous users.
At that point, for everyone who could genuinely take advantage of true anonymity to make a contribution to society -- and I'm sure these people do exist -- how many spammers, virus writers, phishers, fraudsters, copyright violators, organised criminals, paedophiles, and even (really, for once) terrorists are we letting get away with it?
Ah, see, now you're showing bias -- you like the ability (not present in anonymous systems) of the majority to punish the minority for views that the majority does not agree with. Let's take a look:
spammers, virus writers, phishers, fraudsters
Yup, you can't allow anonymous access to a system that has vulnerabilities regarding anonymous use. If you have a user that could be scammed by a stranger coming up to him on the streets of New York, then you have a user that could be scammed by a random emailer. Email systems of today do not support anonymous users safely.
copyright violators...paedophiles
(I assume by paedophiles you mean those who spread and download child pornography, since that's really the only context in which this makes sense.) Yup. You can't have law enforcement on data propagation in an anonymous system. I wouldn't say that this is "good" or "bad" -- it's just a different system to work within. You can't limit content.
organised criminals...terrorists
Again, in an anonymous system, you don't have the ability to punish users for spreading data that the majority dislikes.
It might be worth considering that American Revolutionary War-era sniping, vandalism, and treason is all viewed as having been perfectly reasonable and just (at least in the US) today, but would have been on par with "the terrorists" to King George.
I am one of those people that believes that it is possible to have an anonymous data transfer system that is useful and can provide a valuable set of services. Some things may have to be done differently from how they are in a non-anonymous setting, but I don't think that it's an environment in which humans cannot function.
There is and never will be complete anonymity as long as two points are the beginning and end of a communication. There is only obfuscation and misdirection.
This is not true. Broadcasts provide receivers with anonymity.
A dining cryptographers approach provides the sender with anonymity.
That doesn't mean that true anonymity is *reasonable* or *efficient* (i.e. that Joe Blow can share movies anonymously), but it is certainly possible.
I have AbiWord and Open Office on my computer at the moment, as well as gnumeric. I rarely use "business productivity applications", but they're still there. Just off the top of my head, I have twice as many spreadsheets and wordprocessors on my computer as the typical Windows user does.
I'm not seeing the lack of software, here.
if i am receiving packets, my system must know the address of that sender. that is TCP/IP. therefore, the sender can always be determined.
First, no, because the sender can spoof an IP. However, another system can also forward packets for another. As you said, C can forward backets between A and B.
if you have sender A, receiver B, and intermediary C that passes packets between A and B, C is for all intents and purposes the sender. C will get sued.
(And it doesn't have to be "sued" -- it could be "fired", "divorced", or "arrested", depending upon the content).
Nope. Usenet operators don't get sued, and plenty of content on Usenet is politically hot, illegal, unethical, and you name it. As long as the system simply takes the role of blindly handing on data, without regard for its legality or illegality, it's currently okay in the US.
Phone networks, forums, and so forth are generally immune as well. If they're *knowingly* spreading a particular tidbit of illegal content, *then* they're asking for trouble.
How frequently do you carry your CRT elsewhere?
I mean, sure, portability is nice in a product, but the number of times I've moved my monitors is probably countable on my fingers. With cheap laptops being available, most people that really need to move around much at all just use a laptop.
No, I'm not dead wrong on color accuracy. Go to Tom's Harware and look at the test results of the latest LCDs they reviewed yourself.
(a) There are still people who read Tom's Hardware?
(b) Okay, I did. Now, where is the comparison to CRTs? I see two LCDs being compared against each other -- apparently they are similar. What should I be deriving from this about CRT's versus LCDs?
I have new twin 20" LCDs at work and a new 19" CRT at home (none of which are high-end products), and I can easily say that:
* The CRT can produce much more intense colors.
* The CRT can produce deeper blacks and brighter whites.
* The CRT has faster response time (even CRTs don't update instantly, but it's hard to see trails caused by a light object on a dark area on it, and not hard on the LCD).
Now, both monitors are much better than their predecessors from a few years ago. The CRT is as flat as the LCD, doesn't show any brightness variation over the surface, and has faster response time than my previous, six-year-old CRT. The LCD doesn't show color banding, has no dead pixels, and the trails are no longer bad enough to be distracting. But if I have to choose just one, I'd take the CRT, for the above reasons, and because:
* CRTs can do multiple resolutions without looking horrendous.
* CRTs cost less.
* CRTs have better refresh rates (not just response times).
* The main advantage of desktop LCDs from my standpoint is the space savings -- and at work, all that means is that there's a big, empty, unused gap behind my monitors instead of a gap containing the rear end of a monitor.
Oh, and CRT's DO fade. It's the nature of phospher technology. Contrast and brightness setting can effect the longevity of your CRT but it's design necessitates fading. There's a huge difference between a 5yr old monitor and a brand new one. Put them side by side and look for yourself. I have.
Sure, but all that means is that you turn up the brightness once a year to compensate for the very slow decrease in brightness. You aren't going to be running the thing at 100% brightness at the beginning, so you have many years of brightness decrease in the thing. I had my previous monitor for six years, and never had brightness or contrast above 75%, even at the end.
However, the vast majority of CRTs out there are crap that costs less than half that amount and you know it.
Let's be fair. You're complaining about him discussing a premium $450 CRT, while you were advocating the technical benefits of LCDs using a rather more expensive premium LCD to do so. How about the obvious counterargument -- that the majority of LCDs out there are not comparable to the LCD that you are using as an example?
LVM handles both adding physical volumes and removing physical volumes from a logical volume group. I'm not familiar enough with Windows' logical volume mechanism to say whether or not it can do so.
If you specifically want parity (i.e. RAID level 5), then LVM alone won't solve your problems, since it doesn't do parity generation.
This is a good point. The comparison is being made *based on cost*. If Linux servers are half as expensive in initial cost as Windows servers and there are twice as many Linux servers out there, the survey still holds.
Can all the drives be used efficiently, or is this wasteful in some way?
I believe all the RAID levels would take the size of the smallest drive and only use that ammount on all drives.
However, what you want is actually a single logical volume across multiple physical devices, and both Windows and Linux can do this. I forget the term for it under Windows, but under Linux, you want LVM or "Logical Volume Manager".
Okay, you asked for it. Here's a raw, unvarnished look into the secret world of the neoconservative. This site has many other threads that will help you understand Bush supporters. Or at least be amused.
"BS", not "FUD". "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt" is a particular subcateogry of "BS" that does not apply here. Nobody is trying to alarm someone with vague accusations.
Kinda scary imho, but at the same time, I'm not worried. Why? Because I haven't done anything wrong.
Read 1984, which discusses this exact concept -- the very straightforward idea, that "people who have done nothing wrong have nothing to fear, so it should be acceptable to monitor everything".
The problem with it is that this strategy leads an unstable system that can easily degrade into a very unpleasant system. If the government starts abusing the power against political opponents, and it's a felony to inform someone that they're being monitored. It allows the majority to enforce all of their values on the minority -- one reason our democracy works is because the ability of the majority to monitor and punish those who deviate from their views is limited for simple, technical reasons (right now, it's really impossible to monitor all transgressions). For example, most of the US is Christian. Would you want to be punished for views that do not fit with a Christian view? And if you were, history has told us (the Catholic church in the past, Soviet Russia, etc) that the ability to punish those with value deviations can be used to indoctrinate new members of the system with the same values, and thus perpetuate and spread ideology that is globally nonoptimal.
In your particular case, (no DHCP logs, minimum mail) this may represent minimal privacy intrusion.
But what about all the people that *do* keep logs? Or are required to by the *next* law that gets passed (which isn't "so bad", since it's become already legal for the feds to sieze any data generated).
The two terms are "paleoconservatives" and "neoconservatives". The current crop of Bush supporters are generally "neoconservatives" -- PNAC fans. The conservatives that agree with Bush on social values (limiting stem cell research, partial-birth-abortions, condom education, etc), but disagree with him when it comes to expanding spending and his transfer of state rights (especially security and police-related) to the federal government) are called paleoconservatives, and while they may support Bush, you will probably hear griping from them.
Paleoconservatives are financially similar to libertarians (though not socially similar). Neoconservatives are pretty much exactly opposed to libertarians.
First of all, I'd like to say that Slashdot's human-testing images are getting ever-more unreadable and are approaching the point that I can't read them. Guys, if we've reached the point that the OCR is that good, you just need to use a new approach to distinguish between robots and people.
Okay. On to story commentary.
My one, overriding point is that I think that this guy frequently asks for something to alleviate something that irritates him, but doesn't consider what would actually happen if he *got* that thing.
We get so overjoyed every time an enemy actually shoots from cover in a game that we forgive the fact that real, advanced A.I. is as much an unfulfilled promise as the flying car. Where are the FPS bad guys who can adapt their strategy on the fly?
(a) This is hard to do. Really, really hard. Every CS student who goes in and takes some basic AI classes immediately thinks "Gee, I can just ram all these variables into a neural net and have a learning AI". Then they get time last in the development process, and then discover that it isn't actually so easy to produce "intelligent" behavior. A second problem is that most AIs provide a reasonably consistent behavior. It may be kind of stupid to have a monster run straight at a character, but at least it's not the monster running in the opposite direction and shooting at his own comrades. That's easy to happen in a "learning" environment, because you have to deal with something that can change its logic significantly. AI has a lot of input variables involved, and it's hard to test every case available, and just one screw-up really breaks the illusion. With *humans*, this isn't a problem because every person has a huge set of knowledge that we call "common sense" that will override stupid behavior. We can't just produce an AI with common sense (well, maybe we can, but if so, it's going to have much more important impacts than making FPSes slightly more fun).
(b) Real AI isn't necessarily fun. It's exciting to mow down mobs of stupid enemies, because you're vicariously enjoying the equivalent of a superhero. Think about what happens in real life, with real, human-level AI. There are no 5000 person killing sprees that go on for days. Someone kills maybe twenty people, a SWAT team hunkers down, sits in a negotiation position, and maybe shoots the guy. That's not fun or exciting (well, unless you want a SWAT simulation).
(c) Screenshots sell games. AI increases replayability. Nobody (nobody statistically significant) plays a game for fifty hours and then decides whether or not to buy a game. Not surprisingly, the bulk of the cycles go to better screenshots.
(d) Remember that *you* had fun with enemies that come right at you years ago. Now, you know all the techniques to beat simple strategies like that, and you want something new. But lots of people didn't spend vast amounts of time learning these strategies, so straight-at-me still works nicely for them.
(e) If you want it, convince reviewers to review it. That means longer review times. That means players being willing to wait for later reviews (and not just going to the first review, which discusses graphics and cosmetics). Players seem to pretty consistently go to the early reviews. To really know a game well, I'd say that a (knowledgeable) gamer would have to play it start-to-end, possibly a few times, though this depends on the genre. No mainstream Web reviewers are going to do this, because it takes so bloody long.
It has to do with the fact that both the XBox 360 and the PS3's Cell CPU use "in-order" processing, which, to greatly simplify, means they've intentionally crippled the ability to make clever A.I. and dynamic, unpredictable, wide-open games in favor of beautiful water reflections and explosion debris that flies through the air prettily.
I haven't followed the XBox or PS3 design at all, but this smells an awful lot like random bullshit from someone without a technical background. V
One Bible teacher I heard tried to argue that in order for aliens to exist on other planets, Jesus would have had to go and die for their sins.
It's okay. Squeeple Gorb III, the green blob lifeform on their own planet, already died for their sins.
Seriously, Jesus would have been an Arabic-looking guy. But go to Europe or the US, and you get a very distinctive Anglo-Saxon brown beard and hair that looks kind of like a non-pudgy Stallman wearing a pure white robe. We've gotten so used to it that we don't notice it.
If you go to Mexico, you'll see pictures of a Mexican Jesus, and to China pictures of a Chinese Jesus. Very unsettling. It really drives home the scamminess of the whole thing.
I would like to see how that number would compare to the same survey taken after the War of the Worlds movie comes out.
You mean we might invade their homeland to take their natural resources?
C'mon, we wouldn't do something like that to someone else. We're the good guys!
I was asking questions on www.linuxquestions.org, but nobody could help me even though I posted all of the error messages and problems, so they recommend I try another version of Linux.
:-)
Often a blame-shifting problem. If nobody present is sure what to do, recommending "another distro" is a popular way to avoid staining Linux's reputation. (And this is coming from someone who doesn't own any Windows computers.) There are good reasons to choose particular distros, but if you are looking for a general-purpose distribution and someone is recommending switching distros to solve a particular problem, and you're already using one of the mainstream distros (Fedora, Debian, SuSE, Mandriva....), then they are not giving you good advice. It should be quite possible to get things working on your distro.
I'd recommend trying an appropriate Linux Usenet newsgroup for help, and if you know what software package is breaking, the mailing list or IRC channel for that software package. I've been unimpressed with a number of general Linux web forums -- there are so many web forums that the degree of expertise on them is spread very thin, and it seems to be a large number of new folks that are just getting things up and running.
You shouldn't need to recompile anything to get Fedora working again. The days of recompiles solving things are pretty much in the past -- this was mainly an issue back before everyone started using modular kernels, and folks had to recompile their kernels when they added hardware.
This site illustrates one of the problems with Linux that most regular users would have. How do you pick one of these? How do you compare them all and say "That one has the features I need". It looks like there is at least 50+ different distros. Do you have to click on each little site info graphic just to learn about them? It is just too confusing to know which one to use, and I'm a computer programmer with a decent amount of computer skills. I'd hate to see what poor Aunt Mable or Grandma would think if they saw that list.
The typical "default choice" that I'd probably recommend would be Fedora. It has wide deployment and thus is the distro most likely to be supported by any binary-only software, and most likely to be well-tested with a given application. It isn't as radically Free as Debian, but it's in the close second-tier -- RH does a number of things that aren't in their own interest but promotes the use of Free software, like including Mozilla instead of Netscape before it was really ready, or including ogg support instead of mp3 support. Fedora is probably not the best choice if you already know that prefer KDE to Gnome, since Red Hat puts more work into Gnome than KDE.
Debian is probably best for folks who want to work on a maximally community-oriented system, where as many people as possible are volunteer contributors.
For off-CD, no-hard-drive-installation running, Knoppix seems to have pretty much taken over -- I don't look at SuperRescue any more when I want to do rescue work.
Everyone has their own preferences, of course, and biases based on what they use. I can only give what reflects my own.
* I don't like SuSE, because they seem to have moved a little too far away from the Free ideology, from an interview with their CEO that I read. I remember Ransom Love doing this, and what ensued. Also, I'm not thrilled with their actions (like delaying distribution of ISOs for new distro releases until after they've sold commercial copies for a while).
* I don't know what the story is with Mandrake (well, Mandriva these days). They kept chugging along for a long time. I've never used them, but they used to be my recommendation for people that wanted "Red Hat, but with a KDE focus".
* Periodically, I think about looking at Gentoo (I don't have much reason to go to the effort of switching distros, but it'd be interesting to try installing it sometime I'm just setting up a throwaway Linux box to wor
(a) This has nothing to do with RFID, as the parent stated.
(b) Mice powered by induction from a special mousepad (or top-of-the-mousepad) have been around for a very long time. Presumably these didn't catch on for the same reason that optical mice that required a mousepad with a grid didn't catch on -- people don't like being forced to have a particular mousepad.
(c) Tesla owns your ass, mouse-people -- he powered lamps with remotely transmitted power twenty-five miles away.